ABSTRACT
In his intriguing piece, ‘The truth about tourism,’ Tribe (2006) offers an overview of how knowledge about tourism is established. He posits that tourism as a phenomenon is subject to ‘force-fields’ that resist or promote knowledge creation. Five overarching factors at work in the knowledge force-fields are: person, rules, position, ends and ideology. These five factors are not discrete forces; their overlaps and inter-relationships mediate in the process whereby the phenomenal world of tourism is translated into its known world:
Tourism phenomenon<->knowledge force-field<->tourism knowledge
Tribe says that ‘different cultural ensembles sustain different recipes for truth and knowledge . . . [and that] reflecting on cultural situatedness helps to understand the consequences of this fact’ (ibid.: 361). The reference to ‘who,’ ‘how,’ ‘for whom’ and ‘where’ (ibid.: 361) as important questions for research raises the significance of the implications of these thoughts for Asian tourism research which is the remit of this chapter. I provide a perspective on the directions taken by Asian tourism knowledge as tourism becomes more prominent in Asia. In doing so, the idea is not to propound essentialism and to distinguish the emergent Asian tourism as indeed different from Western tourism. A call for an analysis of tourism knowledge formation in Asia does not amount to an intention to discard existing knowledge. Rather, it is to emphasize the need for a reassessment of what we think may be, at the end of the day, reflections on inclusivity of ‘truths.’ Two bodies of work have contributed to this introspection. First, postcolonialism studies. Hall and Tucker (2004) argue that tourism reinforces and is embedded in postcolonial relationships. In spite of this, postcolonialism remains on the fringes of academic tourism discourses, unlike other disciplines such as geography, anthropology and cultural studies where discussions on the political, economic and socio-cultural impacts and implications of direct and indirect colonial rule are rich and nuanced and include renderings about the bi-directional influences between the colonized and the colonizer. Given the deep inequalities between the North
and the South, deconstructing and exposing the underlying discursive and material manifestations of the dominance of Western knowledges and practices in tourism studies helps to reorientate knowledge accumulation processes away from what were once considered innate universalisms. Indeed, as pointed out in Chapter 1, there would be more fruitful intellectual discussion if tourism researchers working on Asia do not uncritically accept notions about authenticity, the tourist gaze, and so on. Hence, the need to include an overview of the manner in which Asian tourism knowledge is constructed.
